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Republican lawmakers in several states have begun the process of rolling back tenure at their public institutions of higher education on the grounds that no one should have a lifetime job. And yet, many national conservatives seem determined to defend Justice Clarence Thomas on those very grounds.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The only career advice you’ll ever need Why so many conservatives feel like losers The most jarring—and revealing—moment from Trump’s CNN town hall Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Dancing Bears

Conservatives, in general, hate the idea of academic tenure. I say this not only as an impression after 35 years in academia (most of them while I was a Republican), but also because conservative officials are taking concrete action against tenure now in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. (Republicans have engaged in similar attempts over the past several years in North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and several other states.)

Decades ago, when conservatives were more consistent in their views, their position on tenure proceeded from their worship of markets. They argued that no other business would protect employees from the consequences of poor performance or even misconduct with an unbreakable contract. A coherent position, perhaps, but one rife with incorrect assumptions, as I’ll explain below.

Full disclosure: I have been denied tenure twice, and granted tenure twice. I’ve chaired a tenure committee, and been on both sides of the tenure process. Often, it’s not a pretty business, but it is essential to higher education.

With some variations between small colleges and big professional schools, the tenure process mostly looks like this: A new teacher with a Ph.D. holds the rank of assistant professor for three years, at which time they face a contract renewal for another three years. During that next contract, they will “come up for tenure,” an up-or-out decision, much like the cut the U.S. military makes after certain ranks, or when a professional firm makes decisions about partnerships.

The applicant submits a package of accumulated work, and his or her department will also ask senior faculty at other institutions to review the entire file and submit letters with their recommendations. (I have been asked to write such letters myself.) The entire package then gets a recommendation from the department and is sent up to a higher body, drawn from other departments and usually convened by an academic dean. A final recommendation is then sent to the school president. At any point in this process, the candidate’s application can fail.

There are multiple layers of review here, and sure, there are many opportunities for mischief. (A classic move, for example, is for committee members to solicit letters from reviewers they know will either support or torpedo a candidate’s application.) Candidates who succeed become an associate professor; the title of full “professor” comes years later and requires another complete review in most places. After tenure, faculty are insulated from firing for just about anything except gross misconduct or financial exigencies—say, if a department is eliminated or cut back.

But “misconduct” covers a lot of ground, and tenured faculty are far from unfireable. Falsifying research, engaging in sex with with students (at least, at those schools where such relationships are forbidden), nonperformance of duties (like not showing up for class), and criminal behavior can all count. My first tenure contract was with a Catholic school that had a “moral turpitude” clause, which as you could imagine can mean many things.

Tenured faculty, however, cannot be fired for having unorthodox or unpopular views, for being liberals or conservatives, for failing your kid no matter how smart you think Poopsie really is, or for being jerks in general. This is as it should be: Some opinions will always be controversial; some teaching styles rub people the wrong way; some classes are harder than others. There are, to be sure, cases where professors are so wildly offensive that they functionally destroy the classroom environment—but such cases are rare and should be adjudicated by the institution, not by the state.

The alternative to tenure is to keep faculty on short-term contracts and to abandon the important democratic principle of academic freedom. If faculty can be fired—or their contracts quietly “non-renewed”—for any reason, they will self-censor. If they think the students are unhappy, they will pander. If you want faculty who are confident, will say what they think, and will deal honestly with students, tenure is essential. If you want faculty who will become timid clock-punchers, then contracts are the way to go. The contract system eventually grinds down even the most well-intentioned academics, and, as I once warned one of my own institutions, it turns many of them into dancing bears for student and administration applause.

Dancing bears are exactly what today’s Republicans want. Some of the market-oriented GOP attacks on hidebound faculty many years ago had merit; during my career I saw colleges wrestle with that very problem. The current GOP assault on tenure, however, is about culture, not economics or even education. The GOP base doesn’t like that universities are full of liberals, and so Republican elected officials attack higher education for the rush of approval they’ll get, much of it from people who no longer have kids anywhere near college age. As FiveThirtyEight’s Monica Potts noted, there’s a reason that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his tenure-review bill in a ceremony at The Villages, Florida’s noted retirement community.

Meanwhile, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik proudly sponsored a legislative attack on academic freedom, charging that leftism “has pervaded” the State University of New York system and asserting that she was going to do something about it. Elise Stefanik, of course, went to Harvard. But like DeSantis (a graduate of Harvard and Yale), she was going to make sure that the commoners weren’t exposed to any dangerous ideas at the schools reserved for the proles, the rabble whose names are not Elise Stefanik or Ron DeSantis.

Nowhere, however, is the hatred of a guaranteed lifetime job more hypocritical than in the continued right-wing defenses of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The litany of Thomas’s ethical issues is far beyond anything that required poor Abe Fortas to step down from the Supreme Court in 1969. Thomas’s behavior cannot adequately be captured by so gentle a phrase as the appearance of impropriety, the standard set for other U.S. judges. But despite Thomas being utterly insulated from consequences, conservatives deny even that Thomas should face criticism. As Justice Samuel Alito whined recently: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

(Alito is plenty angry about criticism of the members of his own club, but he seems less concerned about attacks on other government employees—especially far less powerful people such as teachers, election officials, and civil servants. But I digress.)

What’s really going on, of course, is that Republicans have given up on persuading their fellow citizens to support them at the ballot box, and so they’ve decided to get what they want by using a tactic for which they once excoriated the left: appealing to judges who have lifetime appointments. Professors with secure jobs are a threat to the republic, apparently, but judges who can throw the country into turmoil with one poorly reasoned opinion must be defended at all costs.

I support lifetime tenure for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, not least because I do not want them to try to time their judgments against impending deadlines for retirement. But Republicans across the country who are railing against ostensibly unfireable elites on campuses might consider being a bit more consistent about one sitting in regal isolation on First Street in Washington, D.C.

Today’s News The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google and Twitter in a victory for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social-media platforms from liability over content posted by users. An 8-year-old girl died in a detention facility in Texas, as the death toll at the southern border continues to rise. Disney canceled its construction plans for a roughly $1 billion office complex in Orlando. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the problem with state bans on gender care.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Ellen Graham / Getty; Harrington Collection / Getty.

How to Have a Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids

By Elise Hu

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege.

Read the full article.

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Read. Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which delves into the weird mindset of doomsday preppers.

Watch. HBO’s new limited series White House Plumbers explores the banal oafishness behind the Watergate scandal.

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P.S.

I wrote a few days ago about the infighting among Russian elites, who are all keen to blame one another for Russia’s miserable military performance. The Ukrainians are soon to launch a counteroffensive, and the reporter Anna Nemtsova wrote today that she’s never seen the Kremlin so rattled. And rightly so: Russian casualties are mind-boggling. By most estimates, in the battle for Bakhmut, 20,000 Russian men have been killed and 80,000 more wounded. One hundred thousand casualties in six months and mostly in the fight for one city is why both the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, the privately run army of mercenaries, are now populating their ranks with men dredged out of Russia’s prisons.

Life inside Russia’s prisons is a mystery to most Westerners, but it is actually a very structured hierarchy, based on rules and castes. I want to point readers toward this excellent explainer on Russian prison culture, and why that culture all but guarantees that the prisoners would be an almost ungovernable military force. The decision to use convicted criminals might seem, to Westerners, a sign of brutal resolve, but it was an extreme, even strategically insane move that has hurt Russian operations more than it helped—and produced few advances but plenty of Russian corpses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

If you’re looking for a reason the world will suddenly end, it’s not hard to find one—especially if your job is to convince people they need to buy things to prepare for the apocalypse. “World War III, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Joe Biden—you know, everything that’s messed up in the world,” Ron Hubbard, the CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told me. His Texas-based company sells bunkers with bulletproof doors and concrete walls to people willing to shell out several thousand—and up to millions—of dollars for peace of mind about potential catastrophic events. Lately, interest in his underground bunkers has been booming. “When the war broke out in Ukraine, my phone was ringing every 45 seconds for about two weeks,” he said.

Many of his clients work in tech: Although the prepper movement in America spans the upper and middle classes, the left and the right, Silicon Valley has in recent years become its epicenter. In his book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff delves into what he calls “The Mindset”—the idea among Silicon Valley doomsday preppers that “winning” means earning enough money to escape the damage that befalls everyone else. In 2018, Bloomberg reported that seven tech entrepreneurs had purchased bunkers in New Zealand. And a 2016 New Yorker profile of Sam Altman quoted the OpenAI CEO as saying he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” in the event of super-contagious viruses, nuclear war, and AI “that attacks us.”

Extreme predictions about what AI could do to the world have since grown louder among a vocal minority of those who work in the field. Earlier this month, the pioneering researcher Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google and warned about the dangers of AI. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he told The New York Times. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.” Other people have gone further. “If we go ahead on this everyone will die,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, the senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, has written, “including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.”

So this should be a moment for AI-doomsday preppers, with frazzled Silicon Valley millionaires shelling out enormous sums of money to shield themselves from whatever AI does to us all. But it’s not. I asked Hubbard if anyone had cited AI to him as their motivator for purchasing a bunker. “I don’t think a single person has brought up AI,” he said. This AI freakout is exposing what has long been true about Silicon Valley’s doomsday preppers: a disaster-proof compound might not save the richest tech moguls, but perhaps that was never the whole point.

Hubbard, one of the biggest names in commercial prepping, told me that his archetypal customer is a 60-year-old man who recently sold his business for $30 million, bought a ranch, and now wants a bunker. Even the tech billionaire he recently worked with didn’t bring up AI as a concern. “What matters is nukes and Yellowstone and meteors,” Hubbard said.

Nobody I talked with in the world of doomsday prepping was sweating AI very much, compared with all the other threats they perceive. J. C. Cole, who runs a prepping business called American Heritage Farms, outlined 13 “Gray Swan” events he believes are both imminent and powerfully destructive. “I don’t worry about AI right now,” he said, “because I think we won’t get there.” He’s pretty sure the U.S. will go to war with Russia and China sometime in the next year. He worries about hyperinflation (“which is happening as we speak”), credit collapse, various natural disasters, and electromagnetic pulses from nuclear bombs, biological weapons, or solar storms destroying the electrical grid. “Before AI comes in and shows up as the Terminator,” he said, “I think we’ll just have a banking crash.” In anticipation of these Gray Swans, he is developing organic farms and underground shelters that can help save a handful of paying members.

Part of why AI-doomsday prepping does not seem to be much of a thing is that it’s still hard to imagine the precise mechanics of an AI threat. Familiar methods of destruction come to mind first, but with an AI twist: Rogue AI launches nuclear weapons, bombs the electrical grid, stages cyberattacks. The shelters that Hubbard offers explicitly provide support for situations like these. Whether the nuclear weapon is sent by an unstable foreign leader or by a malfunctioning or malicious robot, a bomb is still a bomb. People who were already concerned about those threats will prepare, but they would have anyway.

People who are particularly focused on AI’s destructive potential have a different reason not to build a bunker. “The threat we’re worried about is one where we build vastly smarter-than-human AI systems that are resource-hungry and therefore harvest every atom of material on every plant of the solar system,” says Rob Bensinger, the head of research communications at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “There’s no ‘prepping’ that can be done to physically guard against that kind of threat.” Yudkowsky told me in an email that nobody he’d consider knowledgeable about AI is doomsday prepping; it makes little sense. “Personally,” he wrote, “I don’t spend a lot of mental energy worrying about relatively mild disaster scenarios where there’d be survivors.” The best way to prepare for an AI doomsday, then, is to fight the technology’s further development before it gets too powerful. “If you’re facing a superintelligence, you’ve already lost,” Yudkowsky said. “Building an elaborate bunker would not help the tiniest bit in any superintelligence disaster I consider realistic, even if the bunker were on Mars.”

The conspicuous lack of doomsday prepping during such a consequential era for AI suggests something else: that among the super-rich in Silicon Valley, bunkers and shelters just aren’t as popular as they once were. Rushkoff told me that the hype around end-of-the-world bunkers has settled, and that some people have seen the foolishness of the enterprise. For doomsdayers who really do fret about the least likely, most devastating scenarios, traditional prep won’t be of much use. “I don’t care how insulated the technology in your bunker is,” he said. “The AI nanos are going to be able to penetrate your bunker … You can’t escape them.” An AI takeover would be the final phase of Silicon Valley’s story of disruption—after taxis and food delivery, the entire human race.

But really, Rushkoff doubts that many ultrarich preppers are truly preparing for the end of the world. What they want, he thinks, is a self-sufficient-island fantasy—more White Lotus than The Last of Us. If this AI moment—when apocalyptic warnings seem to pop up by the day—is not producing a prepping boom, then perhaps there isn’t much substance behind all the expensive posturing. No matter the state of the world, prepping has always been a flashy lifestyle choice. “It doesn’t matter if there’s a disaster or not,” Rushkoff said. “The apocalypse was just the excuse to build these things.”